Look out, Fortnite: Call of Duty is entering the battle royale market

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Between Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), gaming has been dominated by the battle royale genre for over a year. With millions of downloads and active players between the two games, gamers’ battle royale fervor was bound to entice competitors to enter the market. And today (May 17), the biggest potential competitor to Fortnite and PUBG yet has announced an upcoming battle royale mode: Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises of the last decade.

Call of Duty‘s new battle royale mode: “Blackout”

In today’s live game reveal, Activision announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the latest title in the franchise, will include a battle royale mode called “Blackout.” The trailer for the game mode promises gamers that Blackout will be the “battle royale, the Black Ops way,” featuring Call of Duty‘s signature first-person-shooter mechanics and aesthetic.

Although Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 isn’t slated to be released until October 2018, Fortnite and PUBG‘s developers should start to worry about losing their gamer base. “Blackout” could successfully walk the line between PUBG‘s gritty, war-torn visuals and realistic military-inspired mechanics and Fortnite‘s broad, arcade-style appeal, while forgoing PUBG‘s steep difficulty curve for shooting and Fortnite‘s steep difficulty curve for building.